Meanwhile, Winterborne and Grace Melbury had also undergone their
little experiences of the same homeward journey.
As he drove off with her out of the town the glances of people fell
upon them, the younger thinking that Mr. Winterborne was in a pleasant
place, and wondering in what relation he stood towards her.
Winterborne himself was unconscious of this. Occupied solely with the
idea of having her in charge, he did not notice much with outward eye,
neither observing how she was dressed, nor the effect of the picture
they together composed in the landscape.
Their conversation was in briefest phrase for some time, Grace being
somewhat disconcerted, through not having understood till they were
about to start that Giles was to be her sole conductor in place of her
father. When they were in the open country he spoke.
"Don't Brownley's farm-buildings look strange to you, now they have
been moved bodily from the hollow where the old ones stood to the top
of the hill?"
She admitted that they did, though she should not have seen any
difference in them if he had not pointed it out.
"They had a good crop of bitter-sweets; they couldn't grind them all"
(nodding towards an orchard where some heaps of apples had been left
lying ever since the ingathering).
She said "Yes," but looking at another orchard.
"Why, you are looking at John-apple-trees! You know bitter-sweets--you
used to well enough!"
"I am afraid I have forgotten, and it is getting too dark to
distinguish."
Winterborne did not continue. It seemed as if the knowledge and
interest which had formerly moved Grace's mind had quite died away from
her. He wondered whether the special attributes of his image in the
past had evaporated like these other things.
However that might be, the fact at present was merely this, that where
he was seeing John-apples and farm-buildings she was beholding a far
remoter scene--a scene no less innocent and simple, indeed, but much
contrasting--a broad lawn in the fashionable suburb of a fast city, the
evergreen leaves shining in the evening sun, amid which bounding girls,
gracefully clad in artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, black,
and white, were playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the
pride of life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from
the open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls--and this was a
fact which Grace Melbury's delicate femininity could not lose sight
of--whose parents Giles would have addressed with a deferential Sir or
Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely farmsteads did not quite
hold their own from her present twenty-year point of survey. For all
his woodland sequestration, Giles knew the primitive simplicity of the
subject he had started, and now sounded a deeper note.